Inside, she found herself in a busy, chaotic workshop, a markedly different environment from the quiet, efficient, largely automated Fog repair docks she was used to. This place was grubby and noisy, with numerous chains and hoists hanging from the steel beams that criscrossed the space under the high, peaked roof, mysterious pairs of rails running here and there embedded in the concrete floor, and what looked like pieces of dismantled miniature warships scattered everywhere, on stands and workbenches. Long trestle tables, steel-legged with scarred, grime-stained wooden tops, held jumbled assortments of oily parts. Showers of sparks from grinding and welding operations flickered here and there.

There were a few workers in evidence, here and there alongside various projects in progress. The nearest one, standing with her back to the door and her arms folded as she surveyed the scene, was a slim woman with the top of an orange work coverall tied around her waist and a nominally-white tank top above, her green hair pulled back in a ponytail underneath a battered white hardhat.

"Uh... excuse me?" said Akashi. When the remark drew no response, she tried again, this time almost shouting to be heard over the cacophony of the workshop.

This time the green-haired woman heard her. Turning around, she proved to be a youthful specimen with wide brown eyes, which went slightly wider still with curiosity at the sight of someone she'd never seen before.

"Uh, hi, I'm Akashi—repair ship with Admiral Ravenhair's White Rose Fleet. I'm supposed to meet someone called Vestal here?"

"Oh hey, yeah, we were told you'd be coming by," said the green-haired girl, grinning. "Light cruiser Yūbari. Nice to meet you!" She offered a hand to be shaken, then belatedly noticed how dirty it was and converted the gesture to a fist bump instead.

With that complete, she retrieved a bright green hardhat and a pair of eye protectors from a rack near the door, handed them to Akashi, and went on, "C'mon, I'll show you to the inner sanctum."

Akashi put on the safety gear, as superfluous as it was in her case, and followed Yūbari as she led the way to the first of a row of old-fashioned wooden doors set into one side wall of the workshop. The door had a frosted glass panel taking up most of the upper half, on which someone had painted the word 𝕊𝕦𝕡𝕖𝕣𝕚𝕟𝕥𝕖𝕟𝕕𝕖𝕟𝕥 in an equally old-fashioned font. Next to it, an enameled metal sign screwed to the wall read respirator required beyond this point.

Yūbari knocked, then swung the door open without waiting for a reply and went inside, gesturing for Akashi to follow. The room beyond the door was an office, high-ceilinged but narrow and almost unbelievably messy, with documents strewn across the top of a grey-painted metal desk and bulging out of the unclosably overstuffed drawers of a row of file cabinets. The place was redolent with the mingled smells of coal smoke, heavy fuel oil, and lubricating grease. Above the desk, a ceiling fan on a long drive shaft hung from the ceiling, turning lazily and drawing an interesting vortex pattern in the cloud of smoke that filled the upper third of the office's volume.

Standing behind the desk was the source of the smoke. She was a woman, dressed similarly to Yūbari but for the dark grey color of her coverall, and the fact that she was wearing it all the way up, sleeves rolled, and had a worn leather welder's apron over it. Instead of a hardhat, she had a crumpled khaki U.S. Navy officer's cap, circa World War II, crammed down on her head. Akashi wondered whether the ponytail draped forward over her shoulder was really iron-grey, or just as dirty as her clothes. She did look a few years older than Yūbari, with crows' feet at the corners of her eyes, but her arms were powerfully muscled and she gave off a distinct air of vitality.

At the moment they entered the office, this woman was engaged in two activities simultaneously:

1) Smoking like a steel mill; and

2) Shouting at someone down the line of an antique black desk phone, the receiver of which she held to her head with one hand while the other gesticulated with her pipe.

"—don't give a sweet goddamn what your 'standard operating procedure' is, Mac," she growled in a voice that went with the pipe. "When I get a turret in my shop with a main rotator bearing sounds like it's been lubricated with sand, I replace the sonofabitch. That's my standard operating procedure, and I expect to have the supplies I need to carry it out on hand at all fucking times. Capeesh? Now get on it." With that, and without giving the person at the other end any time to reply, she banged the phone down hard enough to make the bell ring, then stood glaring at it until the sound faded.

"Saint Isambard help me," she grumbled, "the beancounters in this place are worse than when I was alive." Then, seeming to notice for the first time that she had company, she looked up and said, "Who's this, then?"